Morning Briefing: Mejia's final audition?

Adam Rubin has covered the Mets since 2003. He's a graduate of Mepham High School on Long Island and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined ESPNNewYork after spending 10 years at the New York Daily News.
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With Daisuke Matsuzaka looking like he will claim a spot in the rotation and Lannan seemingly penciled into the bullpen, Mejia may find himself the odd-man out and instead in a stacked Triple-A Las Vegas rotation to open the season. The 51s’ rotation should include Noah Syndergaard, Rafael Montero and Jacob deGrom.

• Steve Serby in the Post has a Q&A with David Wright. On his December wedding and how marriage can improve his baseball play, Wright tells Serby: “I’ve had problems in the past of kinda taking baseball home with me. And I think that this will help me out in the fact that I’ll be able to separate the two. And I think ultimately that’ll make me a better player because … especially when I’m struggling, when the team’s struggling, I have a tendency to just constantly think about it.”

• Ken Belson in the Times reviews the recent history of the pitcher batting eighth, which Collins may employ on occasion this season. “I wouldn’t want to be blamed if it ended up costing the team a game,” analyst Ron Darling told Belson.

• Josh Satin annually has a high batting average on balls in play. His theory why? “My whole philosophy of hitting -- which is kind of similar to what [the Mets] want -- is swing at the best pitch you’re going to get and don’t swing at marginal pitches, which I think creates maybe a few more strikeouts but allows you to square the ball up more,” Satin told Anthony Rieber in Newsday. “You square the ball up more, you’re going to have a higher batting average on balls in play, especially if you strike out a little more. It’s not like it’s a surprise to me.”

• Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, attended Saturday’s Mets game wearing a Brooklyn Cyclones jersey with his last name and No. 44 on the back.

• Columnist Bob Raissman in the Daily News applauds Matt Harvey for speaking out. Raissman, incidentally, notes that SNY ratings were 14 percent higher when Harvey pitched last season than the network’s season average.

• The Mets suggest there are not a rash of Tommy John surgeries in the system, and that Harvey’s surgery as well as Jeremy Hefner’s last year skew the impression. "You’re talking like three percent of our guys are having Tommy John," Dickie Scott, who helps oversee the Mets’ minor-league operations, told Mike Vorkunov in the Star-Ledger about the total organization-wide. “When Matt Harvey is one of our guys, it sounds like 90 percent.”

• Chris Young talks with Matt Ehalt in the Record about his winter getting hitting lessons from Hall of Famer Rod Carew.